Central user management which actually is just a front end to adduser and related tools. I keep wondering why this solution was chosen, over things like LDAP. OK, they might want to improve on their Ldap client configuration first.

The package management is a nice feature to centrally check for updates, but not to the extent that one would consider paying for this extra service.

And that last remark goes for Landscap as a whole, actually. I would be curious to see which kind of rates apply for Landscape, but to be honest, the present features do not make it worth to me at any price. The features are just too little.

What we really need is something I’d call “Active Directory on steroids”. Something decentralized so we can easily manage different customer’s infrastructure. So we can centrally do user management, and delegate some organisational unit to a sub server, which eg. the customer can access. Put the Landscape backend in something Ldap. Integrate Samba into it. Make it open so other parties (eg. Zimbra.com) can plug in.

The problem with Ldap being just a standardized protocol, without anybody agreeing on the format of the data in it (one single addressbook schema any one?), we really need to agree on a base structure, without everyone building incompatible directory services. Oh and a decent front-end which enforces those choices would be good.

And yes, this is all plain possible with nowadays tools. But you have to extensively build this yourself. Some decent management tool which integrates those different technologies is really needed to get Linux on another level within businesses.